Blas Roca Calederio, born on July 22 in 1908, was a Cuban communist revolutionary and radical journalist. Roca helped lead the 1933 general strike that ousted Gerardo Machado, and served in Fidel Castro's revolutionary government.

Born into a poor family, Roca began working at age eleven, shining shoes. According to Castro, Roca was already a prominent communist organizer in the province of Oriente at 21 years old.

At age 25, Roca helped lead a two week general strike that ousted dictator Gerardo Machado. By 1936, he was head of the Cuban Communist Party and began serving as a politican, helping author the 1940 Cuban Constitution.

Under Roca's leadership, Cuban communists were instrumental in providing an organizational and ideological structure for Castro's revolution, as well as playing a pivotal role using the party's long-standing ties with the Soviet Union to promote increasingly closer ties during the early days of the revolution.

In 1961, Blas Roca, leading a party delegation, presented a Cuban flag to Nikita Khrushchev during a meeting of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Roca served on the first central committee and politburo of the new Communist Party of Cuba, founded in 1965.

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  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    4 months ago
    spoiler

    For me, the scene, and especially the flying ointment scene right after, established that the witch was real and everyone was going to die miserably. Opening the story with grinding the baby up for jet fuel kinda said "All these people are fucked" and, I guess, Everyone's role seemed pretty straightforward at that point, And I just wasn't interested in watching them all die gruesomely.

    I very much prefer horror movies where normal people are confronted by something they don't really understand, but giving it all away right at the start; there is a witch, the witch runs on 18th century New England witch tropes, everyone's going to die or worse, I didn't feel any need or desire to root for the protagonists. If they let their baby get eaten they weren't going to do anything admirable or interesting. At that point they were just chumps who were going to get picked off one by one like a scream movie. It didn't help that they were protestant fanatics which I find intensely unlikable for personal reasons.

    I guess, for me, it was protagonists I actively disliked, a supernatural christian monster that was real and had absolute power over the situation, and I guess I just didn't see any space for a plot or characters to develop at that point, especially as it kept running out tropes like the rabbit familiar. Maybe that was key; The protagonists weren't people I related to as anything but absolute enemies, so I wasn't invested in them at all and didn't care about hteir inevitable deaths? Idk. it was a very long time ago.

    In terms of like, the movie on it's own merits? It was clearly made with a lot of craft, love, and commitment. Just not my thing at all.

    well, and thinking about it, I know enough about "witchcraft" that all the witchy stuff was very transparent. Idk if the general audience immediately recognized all the relevant tropes and understand what they meant and symbolized. i think that likely took a lot of the fun out of it.